Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

1 June 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not confuse hype with hope. We know all that glitters is not gold, but let us not be misled when the glitter looks good anyway. Let us not be taken in by someone else’s excited messages that don’t feed our enduring hungers.

We are here to grow into our highest callings as children of the universe, children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us not accept messages that don’t bless us.

May we learn to shun voices that say, “You’re nothing without me. You’re nothing without Jesus. You’re nothing without God.” These messages don’t come from Jesus or God, but from those acting like “used God” salesmen who hawk them for personal profit or power.

Our good news – the kind of truth that can set us free – may indeed be a truth that passes all understanding, but not a truth that bypasses understanding.

We are all looking for good news. We need truth that makes us feel more cherished, more alive and whole, a truth that commands us to serve higher ideals than we might otherwise have done, and live a life of greater integrity and courage than we might have stumbled into. And it must bless us and make us feel beloved of this place. Without these things, it isn’t our good news, and we need to keep listening. For it will come, our good news. Let us keep listening for words of truth and empowerment, the good news that can make us free. For it will come. Amen.

SERMON: Can Evangelicalism be (Gasp!) Dying?

We’ve been told, for years, that Christian evangelicals make up 25% of the U.S. population and are growing, that evangelicals and “values voters” delivered the last two presidential elections – rather than that both elections were stolen. We’ve read that atheists are the most distrusted group of people in the country, and that they are at any rate far less moral than the kind of evangelicals who have given the Religious Right so much political power since 1980. Now I like evangelism, and even think of myself as an evangelist. The word means spreading the good news, and I think that’s what honest religion should be about: spreading the good news. But when evangelism isn’t done honestly, when it’s more about deceit than delivery, then it’s a bad thing, the good news lies elsewhere, and we need to know about it.

An author named Christine Wicker has written a new book called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was in town for a presentation last week, and I had several hours to talk with her over a long dinner and longer lunch. I’ll draw on some of her work for the sermon in two weeks. But I want to introduce you to it today in the time we have left, and talk about why she sees the evangelical movement dying, how she says we”ve been duped about the strength of the movement for almost 30 years, and what it might all mean for us: what the good news really is.

Christine was raised an evangelical Baptist, came to Jesus in an altar call when she was nine years old, left the church some time later, and still has a warm place in her heart for evangelicals, though she says she can’t imagine ever wanting to go to church again. She was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years, and understands how to find good sources. She quotes a lot of figures that are quite damning to that picture of evangelicals in America, but all the figures come from inside the churches themselves. Here are a few of the things she says.

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

And as far as respect goes, when asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower. In an almost comic side note, I wonder how the prostitutes feel about that. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 143) Atheists and nonbelievers are looking pretty good.

Misbehavior is so widespread among evangelicals that one evangelical author (Ronald Sider) calls the statistics devastating. When pollster George Barna, himself an evangelical, looked at seventy moral behaviors, he didn’t find any difference between the actions of those who were born-again Christians and those who weren’t. His studies and other indicators show that divorce among born-agains is as common as, or more common than, among other groups. One study showed that wives in traditional, male-dominated marriages were 300 percent more likely to be beaten than wives in egalitarian marriages. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 80) Evangelicals make up only seven percent of the population, but about twenty percent of the women who get abortions (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 81).

Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 198). This is part of the bigger picture of the continual decline of Christianity in our culture, which is another story that’s been underreported.

These are just some of the headlines. I’ll go into more facets of this in two weeks, because they have deep and compelling implications for us and for all liberal churches.

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.

What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.

I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.

But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we”ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

During the past century, evangelicals have never kept up with the population growth in this country. Not for a century. They don’t have anywhere near the real power they have claimed. They have fought to make abortion illegal for 35 years. It’s still legal. They have fought for a Constitutional amendment to outlaw homosexuality. Nobody’s buying it. And though they have done harm to and through the Republican Party, they don’t have anything like control there either. Remember that the recent court decisions permitting homosexual marriages in Massachusetts, California and New York all came from Republican judges. They have censored some school textbooks, but one result is that American students now lag far behind students in Europe and Asia, especially in science education, which will make us less competitive. Eventually, even market forces will have to improve the quality of our public education, because we need independent thinking workers, not just obedient ones. They are training for the world of yesteryear, but we and our children are learning to live with imagination and hope in the world of tomorrow. We and the modern world are winning, and will win.

What is at stake is whether children must become independent minded and able to reason through tough decisions on their own at early ages or whether they will be sheltered from such decisions until adulthood by families in which obedience to parental and allegedly godly authority is more highly valued. Parents who”ve changed their parenting style have come to believe that their children need new strengths as they face a rapidly changing world, and those strengths need to be developed early. For these parents, physical punishment encourages violence in later life. Bolstering the child’s self-respect and autonomy is important. The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal for their children and for themselves (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 185). This is the way you’ve raised your own children, but so have a growing army of more conservative parents. As Christine says, when was the last time you saw a child being beaten in public? Public standards have changed, and have become more humane and civil than those of the conservative churches. That’s one way to lose parents and children by the drove.

Trying to hold back the modern world and our sciences and our intellectual freedoms is not like the old picture of the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in a dam trying to keep the water from squirting through. It’s more like a crowd of believers standing side by side in a river, imagining they can stop it. But the water just goes between, around and through them, and the river goes on as if they weren’t there.

The saving message here, the good news, is that America is a very different place than many of us have been led to believe it is. And Americans themselves are a very different kind of people. More thoughtful. More reasoning. Less doctrinaire. More changeable. More flexible. Less religious. This is news of a new and powerful form of salvation that comes from knowing the truth, being aware, and acting in fair and compassionate ways. And growing numbers of people are finding it offers better salvation than the traditional Christian stories (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 56). Sometimes they find it in more liberal churches like this one. Sometimes they just find it on their own. But more and more, they know where they’re not going to find it.

Another way of putting this is that repressive and regressive religions tried to fight the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is winning. The spirit of truth, freedom and empowerment is winning, and religions that can’t embrace that spirit cannot make their people whole. Any way you cut it, from any informed religious, ethical or moral perspective, that’s good news. It’s the kind of good news that can save you – It’s the kind of good news that can save your mind, save your souls and save your children. It’s the kind of good news that can save the world. You can get that good news at a lot of liberal churches. You can get it here. That’s not just good news. That’s Halleluja news! And that’s worth an Amen!